PatternExon

Print me a magazine

// November 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // startup idea, wish

I like reading magazines. I like the smell of a new magazine and I like the yellowed pages of an old one. The degrees of freedom that a real print offers are amazing. All the technology in the world cant seem to come up with an alternative thats nearly as good.

I read WIRED in the loo. I subscribed to it when I got my first paycheck in school and have been hooked on since. All the articles are free to read online and yet I like the print. It has as many adverts as articles. Its got a whole stack of subscription slips (which I pray they’d stop for those who are subscribed) and the really annoying six page infomercial (just coz they design it like a normal article I’ll buy the stuff right away, duh). But the articles are pimped up with interesting design. The glitz makes the charts generally unreadable but the typesetting is amazing and its a fun light read.

So heres my wish, if the economics of the long tail that makes WIRED to be printed and delivered to me for less than a dollar are month are sound, why cant I get a compilation of blogs posts spat out of a recommendation engine that can guess what I’ll like printed too. I can imagine a virtual piazza for designers and bloggers where they meet and work together to create a print version of their post thats similar (if not better) to what WIRED does with its articles. And then they annotate this article and push it into a repository. People like me make their selection of articles based on author, topic, designer etc. and the recommendations that I get after the system analyzes my netvibes or google reader feeds. The publisher inserts print ads using something similar to adsense and everyone gets a piece of the action.

I know some of the posts that I read have a small half life, I would not want to read them 17 days later. But most of them can survive for couple of months and some of them are good forever. Also, since I have landed a job, the blogs that I read in a day have halved. I am sure I miss out on a lot of the action in the blogosphere now. Adsense can fail to bring up with advertiser that wants to pay for the publishing an entire article of 2 pages (print version) if its on comparison between neural nets and support vector machines. But may be Springer books is interested if they can slip in 4 quarter page book recommendations. Or may be the conferences that post on comp.ai can be approached. What would make it really cool is if a big newspaper or magazine house does something like this. I know Stallman would not approve of it if New York Times publishes one of his rants sandwiched between RHEL and rackspace adverts. But this needs a existing network of advertisers and the capital to see the idea through.

I agree that breaking even would be challenging but I dont think sony’s book reader is the answer and Kindle just sucks with its complicated DRM nonsense and the iphone was not made for this and most importantly I can fold a magazine, spill coffee over it & forget it on the subway!

The Change Function – Pip Coburn

// January 1st, 2007 // 1 Comment » // books, reading, review

‘Why some technologies Take Off & and Others Crash and Burn’ – now thats a good punch line ..that & the claw…found this book at University City Library. The author is founder of an ‘advisory services firm’.

There are couple of phrases that chime incessantly through out the book -

‘ TPPA – Total Perceived Pain of Adoption’ : let me take this first, this is well-rooted idea thats given a new & (i admit) eye catching name. Fundamentally, it takes time, effort & a genuine need (called crisis, in this book) for the users of any technology (both product & service) to switch to a better technology. The measure of the ease of transition is called TPPA by Mr.Coburn; well not bad. Dissect it -the phrase does hold its ground.

Andy Groove’s 10x disruptive change: if you all could remember Andy Groove’s vastly informative book ‘ Only the Paranoid Survive’ he talks about inflection points, how to capitalize & how to be ready for the next disruptive change. This is the industry wide arcane slang for the – killer app ( with a biz model).

Moore’s Law : no i wont insult you & make a fool of myself by stating the law, only stress on the fact that the author uses it here in a more general & actually pretty intuitive way… its the speed of cost reduction in the tech industry. pretty wide. pretty flexible. pretty good.

The book has a general flaw – the best pieces are borrowed!! Coburn quotes the best in the industry from Doug Engelbart to Larry Page & even the most revered Douglas Adam. The insight is to understand that fancy technology even if price is not an issue will never be popular just coz its fancy…the customer is always right ….& innovation goes askew if the users are forgotten. The case studies are concise, just & mingled with some very witty quotes. The analysis of failures & a few ( good) predictions about for the futures & efficacy of some technologies is also commendable. Coburn also gives back to his super-specialist community heralding the need for Tech Gurus & people who are closer to the users. The importance of feedback is illustrated though i really think he could have come up with a better example than salesforce.com.Actually, I had not heard about Reactrix and that was a pretty interesting read.

The takeaway from the book is again easy & simple but what makes it really stick in ones head is the failure stories that leads to these rules ( or rather Qs that one should ask)…..interesting read….coupla hours and you would be through with it… though the list of what all one should also read becomes pretty obvious when going over the chapter starters. A little more effort and I found the coburn ventures readling list, this is quite a collection, & it would be cruel of me to say that Coburn just tried to make precis of the best in these.